For Sale —American Paradise Read Online Free Page B

the Atlantic Ocean and sprawls across two time zones. Its easternmost city, Palm Beach, overlooks the Atlantic, but if you head due north from Florida’s westernmost city, Pensacola, you will eventually arrive in Chicago. It’s a 540-mile trip down the state’s eastern coastline from Fernandina Beach near the Georgia border to Key West, only ninety miles from Havana, Cuba.
    Only a few white settlers lived between Tampa and Key West before the Civil War. But Fort Dallas, an outpost of the US military from the Seminole Wars, which were fought sporadically between 1816 and 1858, remained as a settlement near the shores of the Biscayne Bay after the struggle ended. The Everglades covered most of southern Florida, and the Glades were inhabited by the handful of Seminoles who had eluded US troops sent to subdue them or drive them out.
    The Civil War could easily have started in Florida several months before Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1861.
    By 1860, the long- simmering dispute about the extension of slavery into US territories had become unresolvable. South Carolina furiously severed its political connection with the United States government on December 20, 1860.
    Mississippi left the Union on January 9, 1861, and Florida seceded on January 10. That same day, Lieutenant Adam Slemmer, in charge of US forces in Pensacola, moved his federal troops into Fort Pickens on Santa Rosa Island, a barrier island just offshore from the city.
    Colonel William Chase, a West Point–educated army engineer who had decided to cast his lot with the Confederacy, led troops to Fort Pickens and demanded that Slemmer surrender. Slemmer refused, and Chase contemplated storming the fort, an act that surely would have sparked war. But he decided against it, and Fort Pickens became one of the few US forts in the Confederacy to remain in Union hands for the entire war.
    After the Civil War ended in 1865, the reunited nation—or at least the victors—got down to the serious business of becoming wealthy. Ulysses S. Grant, the former Union general who finally figured out a way to beat Confederate general Robert E. Lee, was elected president in 1868—although Texas, Mississippi, and Virginia had not been readmitted to the Union and did not vote in that presidential election.
    Author Oliver Carlson noted that President Grant “ushered in that hustling period of the 1870s, when the dominant dream of America was to get rich.”
    The Reconstruction era gave rise to “new Americans” who were “primitive” and “ruthless” souls who didn’t trouble themselves with scruples. They were “a race of buccaneers,” Carlson said.
    While the Old South languished in poverty, mythologized its bloodily defeated “Lost Cause,” and endured military occupation by US troops, men such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Flagler, and “a tribe of other swindlers and railroad wreckers, rascals one and all,” amassed huge fortunes in the final decades of the nineteenth century.
    â€œBut to the man in the street, these were heroes to be cheered for their audacity,” Carlson wrote. “Those who grumbled at their ways were told, ‘You’d do the same thing if you only had the chance.’”
    In 1867, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act over the veto of President Andrew Johnson, and the former Confederate States were occupied by Union troops and placed under military rule. That same year, author Harriet Beecher Stowe—whose book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin , supposedly was cited by President Abraham Lincoln as the cause of the Civil War—bought property on the St. Johns River near Jacksonville and built a winter home there. Her twofold purpose was to build a school for African Americans and allow her son to take advantage of the Florida climate to recover from severe wounds